Alfred Russel Wallace was a British naturalist who did extensive field work in the Malay archipelago (nowadays called Indonesia) where he identified the Wallace line, dividing the flora, fauna and human specificities of the Eastern part of Indonesia from that of Asia.
Wallace even expressed the hypothesis that the Eastern part of Indonesia was formerly part of another continent now partly sunk
beneath the ocean: a sixth continent.
From 1854 to 1862 he travelled through the Malay archipelago to collect specimens and to study Nature. His observations of the marked
biological and zoological differences accross a narrow zone in the archipelago led him to the hypothesis of a zoogeographical boundary now known as the Wallace line
.
